Hey RG, I've been keeping an eye on this thread anticipating your arrival.

It is my (admittedly rather poor) understanding that when an engine is tuned to produce more power one often gets worse emissions. I believe Mazda de-tuned the 8 somewhat in order to meet emissions and prolong the cat could one use Hydrogen to improve emissions and then tune the engine to gain more power but still pass inspection?

Oh course one ends up with more weight and an additional energy drain to accomplish this. It would be a weight + power drain vs HP/Tq gain and perhaps MPG.

My pipe dream is to see some kind of SC with a fuel vaporizing system and perhaps Hydrogen to do what I said.

I really need to read up on meth injection too.(and read more on everything else I mentioned here)

 

When Mazda tested the rotary with hydrogen it had around half the HP and mileage of regular gas.

The reason for this.........for the pressure that can be reasonably stored in a car you have a far less energy then a comparable volumn of gas. You are actual correct in that Hydrogen by weight has 3 times the energy store of gas (120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline). Unfortunately when you look at it by volume, which is the limiting factor in a car you have (8 MJ/liter for liquid hydrogen versus 32 MJ/liter for gasoline). This is why Hydrogen will never be a real player in internal combustion engines.

Additionally you do realise that you would have to use energy to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen with an on board converter. To do this in a volume needed for an internal combustion engine is impractical with present technology.

Finally a far more efficient why to use hydrogen would be a fuel cell which would use the hydrogen 2 to 4 time more efficiently then a Rotary could.

 

At work we use tonnes of Hydrogen every day, to make chemicals.
Our convertor is (AFAIK) the largest in the world. We routinely split thousands of gallons of water per day, for its hydrogen.

The process uses more energy than the hydrogen produced contains.

So whatever you started with - the amount of electricity used, or the amount of chemicals used up - has WAY more power than the actual H2 you get as a result.

If you have lots of electricity to split water into H2+O, why not just use it to turn the wheels?!!?

If you have a fuel cell that can EFFICIENTLY use alcohol as a hydrogen source, then burn it for electricity (which is what fuel cells do) you may come out ahead of actual combustion - but 2000psi hydrogen in a tank for fuel? Waste of time and resources......

S

 

Thank you!

Converting energy from one form (electricity) to another (burnable hydrogen) takes power. How much spare electrical capacity does an average car have? Not much. You could put on a bigger generator, but then you lose HP to generate more electricity to separate the hydrogen from water.

It's as practical as a self-licking ice cream cone.

Didn't somebody mention this "free hydrogen" thing a while back? And get just as huffy when people told him why it wouldn't work?

 

Why is everyone only lookign at cost? There is a huge factor such as the environmental aspect.
Aside form cost the whole point of shifting away from gasoline is to have clean fueled cars so our planet doesnt die int he next 100 or so years...

 

I only care about cost and performance. I won't drive a wussie car just because it's better for the air. There are very easy ways to increase current performance, decrease total emissions expelled, and increase mileage all at the same time while still using oil. People are just too blind to accept it. It's called series hybrids. Not this current parallel crap we have right now.

 

It has to be economically feasible .

 

It's FAR more economical to rearrange our cars components while keeping current technology into series hybrids than it is to implement newer technologies that just don't stand up in the performance department. Hydrogen is a huge waste of time and money. I stead of replacing what we have with something that doesn't compare, we need to learn how to use what we have much more efficiently. It's not that hard to do and it's by far the cheapest option with the most performance potential. It's still lowering emissions and cutting fuel costs by boosting mileage. It's just not sacrificing performance.

I refuse to sacrifice performance in the name of the environment. I don't even run a cat on my RX-7 for this very reason. I take that back. One day a year I do.

 

At present the only time hydrogen makes sense is if you have a large excess of cheap electricity. New Zealand is heading the way into hydrogen with the use of it's vast geothermal electrical generation, cheap and plentiful. But as pointed out Hydrogen is always 10 years away from being a realistic option so only time will tell. RG is correct in the fact that we need to use what we have more efficiently. In my past I would have agreed with him on the environment/performance issue but today I think you can pursue both.

 

We can but we aren't. Series hybrids are the only way to get it all easily, cheaply, and right now. Parallel hybrids like they are producing right now are a waste of time. For the effort they aren't gaining much. After this is implemented, then power the generators with alternative fuels. Cut first consumption down first. Then figure out what to substitute it with.

 

Actually I was replying to the post just before yours. But yeah, you're right.

 

Oops my bad.

 

Imagine how 'efficient' the first IC engines were?
This is the same for any new technology. How many years has the IC engine had to become as 'efficient' as it is today?
Give it some time and you'll see new technologies popping up, but it will take at least a few years for these to become viable. And honestly, I think we don't have much time till we destroy the Earth with our fossil fuel burning/run out of oil (can you say China).

 

As time goes on cars will continue to be more environmentally friendly without giving up performance. I read an article in a magazine about an electric roadster Tesla made up. I'm not talking about some hokey pokey economy car either. The thing generates 248hp, 200lb-ft of torque and pulls nearly a solid 1g during acceleration and has a 250mile range. On top of all that it looks real sharp...only downside is it sells for $100K. But other more economically priced electric cars are soon to follow. Anywho as that car shows performance and earth happy can and will go together. Hydrogen is a very good next step but the problem lies in producing it. Its not a matter of hydrogen not holding enough energy but merely producing it efficiently. A quote from an article mentions "Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost 3x as much energy as natural gas..." so obviously its a good place to look. Popular Mechanics recently did an article looking at how to go about producing enough hydrogen to support our needs and its not pretty. Suffice it to say that at this point in time it just isn't feasible on a massive scale. Until we find a way to make electricity for next to nothing or "find" enough hydrogen its something best left for experimenting not implementing.

 

The Tesla roadster is truly a good performer. Electric cars like that may sound like a good idea but many people fail to realize that we don't have an infrastructure that can support too many of them. If everyone bought an electric car, we'd all be in trouble. We already have issues with our power network failing from high use of air conditioners in the summer. We can't supply enough power for all of our needs now. What happens when we try to charge thousands or millions of cars? We need to rebuild the power grid too to compensate. The electric companies aren't going to be as excited about this as those car owners are. It can be done but it's going to take an awful lot of time and money to get it to that point.

Hydrogen lacks the energy content of almost any other fuel we use. We don't run cars on natural gas (unless someone has done a home conversion) so a comparison to it really isn't valid from an automotive standpoint. It burns far too fast and uncontrollably. It is true that someday in the future, engine technology may be able to take advantage of it's burn properties and get some decent power out of it. We are nowhere even approaching what could be considered close to that point now so it is an unrealistic fuel at this point in human evolution. Maybe one day.

The series hybrid would utilize technology we already have and require no modifications to any of our power or gas infrastructures. It would give us better economy which means less oil consumption, lowered emissions which makes environmentalist nuts happy, would make for a simpler vehicle design which could be used to make them safer, lighter, and roomier, and would have better performance potential which is what really matters anyways. Nothing else changes. We just rearrange what we have. We could do this today. No long term anything. If auto manufacturers built them today, when people saw what they could do, they'd buy them tomorrow. It's so simple that no one is doing it. I don't give them enough credit for having thought of it and finding it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work as well for the oil companies. They pay millions upon millions a year to auto manufacturers. Oil companies need them to change over slowly so they can adapt and keep making money.

Basically our technological progression to better cars is only being stopped by outside financial influences. It's all about money. That's why crap like hydrogen is being looked at. Even it can be made from natural gas. Oil companies aren't going to let us progress so quickly and cut them out. It may sound like a conspiracy theory but that's how big business works.